I visualize teaching a variety of ways. One way, particularly pertaining to this assignment, is the “thinking and doing” aspect of teaching. Visualize a problem in your head. When attempting to solve this problem, you must think of an idea to solve this problem. Then, you must physically do/not do something to carry out the idea to solve this problem. This is similar to what teachers do when teaching students. I will relate this “thinking and doing” concept to our K-12 classroom goals.
Its one thing for us to have these student goals; it’s another for us as teachers to find methods for these goals to be carried out. For me at least, the doing part of this concept will be the most challenging. Now days, students in schools are becoming more diverse. Teachers are having more students in their class with learning disabilities, different cultural experiences and a variety of socio economic statuses.
The goals we listed for students will be an ongoing task. These goals are far more complex than learning a few new objectives of a concept, but also –in my opinion, more important in the long run. The complexity of these goals will require many ongoing assignments during the course of school. Learning respect versus learning about volcanoes contributes to what kind of person you are. A person will most likely not use the information about volcanoes in their lifetime. However, they will use the learned knowledge of respect through out their lifetime. Even though the student goals are going to take a lot more time and effort, they will have a greater impact on students than traditional objectives will.
The concept of "thinking and doing" that you mention reminds me of our in-class discussion related to Professor Kruse's coined terms "minds on" and "hands on." I agree that when solving a problem students need not only be engaged with their bodies but also with their minds. One important (yet very difficult sometimes) part of the "minds on" and "hands on" aspect to problem-solving is making sure students are doing the thinking. What I mean by this is that often we give students steps to solving problems rather than giving them the problem and having them figure out the pathway to solving the problem.
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